


Throw the Windows Wide (And Call to You Across the Sky)

by dietplainlite



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Divergence, Enthusiastic Consent, F/M, Force Bond, Happy Ending, I have been told this is spooky, No Pregnancy, Paranormal Investigators, Rough Sex, Trafficking Mention, Vaginal Sex, Virgin Ben Solo, of sorts, weird Force stuff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:40:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 19,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25207093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dietplainlite/pseuds/dietplainlite
Summary: In a universe where Ben Solo was never separated from his parents, where he never fell, he works as an investigator of strange phenomena, mostly to disprove them as Force related or fraud. On one such mission, he goes to Jakku to investigate a young girl called The Reyna, said to be a great healer and medium. He thinks it's a mundane case of a clever grift. He's not prepared for the encounter to change his life.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 155
Kudos: 181





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The draft for this is mostly finished, with the last few chapters outlined. The chapter count may change as we go along but I plan to update this every Thursday!
> 
> Title is from "Echoes" by Pink Floyd

Niima Outpost, 27 ABY

For most, Jakku is a desolate, dusty junkyard. For others...it is a desolate, dusty junkyard, but so much more. There is a pulse beneath its dead surface, the cold beauty of a sleeping giant’s heart, and for many who dabble in the occult, who seek to harness the Force in one way or another, it is a place of pilgrimage. 

Ben Solo is not here on a pilgrimage, at least not of the spiritual kind. There is a girl here, said to be a healer, to move things with her mind. She is called The Reyna, and the miracles attributed to her range from calling forth lost objects to mending broken bones. She is also said to be able to communicate with the dead. 

She is all of twelve years old. 

Niima outpost is how he remembers it from his travels with his uncle. A rusted collection of tents and stalls scattered around a large canvas roofed pavilion. There’s a landing pad, of sorts, the ships parked around ranging from derelict to state-of-the-art. 

The sun is setting when he arrives, the merchants shutting down for the day, scavengers who worked until the last second shuffling toward the outpost dragging their discoveries behind. 

He heads toward the pavilion, the most permanent structure--using the most liberal definition of permanent--where a blobfish called Unkar Plutt conducts his business in a repurposed cargo crawler, trading Imperial rations of questionable age in exchange for scavenged star ship parts, minus what he charges them to use his washing stations. Ben has seen this type of character on numerous planets. Whether they trade for agricultural products, piece work, or parts, they manage to rake in wealth while the people they deal with barely eke out enough to survive.

Unkar Plutt’s establishment--locals call it the concession stand--is where Ben must purchase his ticket for tonight’s show, as Plutt also serves as the girl’s handler. 

He’s come dressed as an average spacer, in clothes similar to those his father favors (though he would never be caught dead in a vest.) Plutt barely glances at him as he sells him a ticket, more interested in the person next in line, a small human boy staggering under the weight of the goods on his back. 

“The show begins in half an hour, seating is first come first served. No outside food or drink.”

Ben thanks him, but Plutt’s attention is already on the boy. He goes straight to the arena, a tent that has more patches than original canvas covering a dirt floor and rows of benches. There are only a few people in the audience so far. One woman holds a tooka doll to her chest, rubbing its ear absentmindedly as she chats to the man sitting beside her. 

This kind of con usually begins well before the purported miracle worker takes the stage. Plutt will have one or more of his crew pose as patrons, striking up conversations with the marks in order to find out what they’re searching for and reporting back to the boss

Ben buys a bag of dried fruit and a cup of a foul smelling liquor he has no intention of drinking, and settles in on the first row, near the aisle. Within minutes, a man approaches. He’s tall and draped in dusty red desert robes, his skin pale underneath the grime on his face. Ben gives him an open, guileless smile. 

“Gee, I’m so excited for this show. I’ve been wanting to make it here for awhile.”

“I’ve heard wonderful things,” the man says, sitting down. “I hope to speak to my dear sweet mama one more time.”

“You don’t say?” Ben says. “I’m here to speak to my mom, too. She died a year ago, quite suddenly. My sisters have been fighting over the inheritance since. I want to ask her where she left her will.” He smiles again and offers to buy the man a drink. He wants to come off as the best kind of mark: rich, generous, and stupid. 

The man returns his smile and declines the drink, and a surge of greed and envy wafts off of him, as well as smug satisfaction. He thinks Ben has taken the bait, while Ben has been reeling him in all the while. 

“Well,” the man says, ‘I hope we both get what we need. If you’ll excuse me, I gotta go see if there’s a working ‘fresher around here.” 

Ben watches him go, certain he’s going to take the long way to wherever Unkar Plutt or the girl are waiting. 

Despite Jakku’s remote location, the girl performs every night. According to Ben’s source, the house is packed every time, with people coming from the villages dotted around the planet, as well as from all over the galaxy. As the tent fills, Ben has to breathe to center himself, lest the energy overwhelm him. There’s so much anxiety and longing swirling around the room, so much desperation. If he’s not careful, it will seep into his bones and affect his mood. 

The man from earlier comes back and takes his place a few benches down from Ben, while two musicians take their places in a corner. The lights dim as soon as they’re seated, and on a crashing chord from the jet organ, go down completely. A flute trills softly, gaining volume as the lights come up slowly, revealing a young girl, tall for twelve, with dark hair pulled tightly into three buns that cascade down the back of her head like the horns of a krayt dragon. Her clothes are in better condition than any he’s seen here, pristine white with gauze draped across her shoulders and tied at the waist, flowing almost to the floor. She looks around with large dark eyes, her face serene. 

She fixes on him and her mask slips. For a moment, she looks like a much younger, confused child. The moment passes, however, and she walks toward him. Ben had not expected to be the first mark. 

“You,” she says. 

Ben smiles, expecting the girl to tell him she has a direct line to his poor dead mother, who at the moment is likely doing something on the Senate floor, perfectly alive and robustly well. 

“Yes,” he says, eyes wide and eyebrows raised. 

The girl comes to stand in front of him and it’s not until then that it hits him. She is radiating energy, such that he can practically see it rolling off of her. It feels violently blue, with sparks of yellow. Then the world goes silent, as if they’re standing alone in a vast, empty room. 

“You’re afraid,” she continues. “That you’ll never be worthy.”

“Worthy of what?” he croaks, his mouth gone dry. 

“Worthy of your name.”

He forces her from his mind with a strength that sends her reeling, and all the sound and color come back into the world as her bodyguards rush toward them. He hasn’t touched her, but one guard takes The Reyna by the arm while the other two take his. She goes pale and stares at him, perplexed, her eyes huge in her white face. 

“Wait!” she cries, as they pull him out of the tent, but the guards don’t listen. 

He lets them escort him out, even though he could end their lives--or at least cause them serious injury--with a single thought. It might be dangerous to display his powers, for himself and the girl. It’s obvious she has no clue what her powers actually are, or that others share them, and her handler likely wants to keep it that way. 

They shove him harder than they need to, and he makes a show of falling into the dirt, breathing hard and focusing on not making their brains explode inside their heads. Once they’ve gone back inside, he brushes himself off and heads to his ship. 

He showers and climbs into his bunk to read, having no plans to leave until he’s talked to the girl again, though he has no idea how to arrange that.

It turns out that he doesn’t have to do anything at all. Hours after the show has ended, when the outpost has gone quiet, there’s a soft knock on his ship’s hatch. He goes to answer, fingers near his blaster, but when he gets close to the door, he feels her presence, though not as bright as before. She’s alone. 

He opens the hatch and she rushes in, wearing a hooded cloak patched together from various other garments, including what appears to be an old Rebellion jumpsuit and an Imperial officer’s uniform. 

“I can’t stay long,” she says. “I put my guards to sleep, but it’s hard to keep it going for long if I’m not nearby.”

“Do they know you can do that?” 

“No,” she says. “And they can’t ever find out.”

She sits down at the table in the galley and lowers her hood, fixing her eyes on him. 

“Are you a healer, too?” she asks. 

He sets out a can of water and a packet of crisps. She eyes them warily. 

“I don’t have any money. He keeps it all.”

“You don’t have to pay me. You’re my guest.”

She keeps her eyes on him as she reaches across the table slowly, then snatches the food and water back faster than normal people could see. She doesn’t open them.

“So, are you?” she presses.

“A healer? I can do a few things. Scrapes, bruises, simple fractures. But it’s not my specialty.”

“What is your specialty?”

He smiles. She’s direct in a refreshing way. “Mind reading, mostly. And I can stop a blaster bolt in the air.”

Her eyes widen and the energy around her flares. “Really?” 

“Yeah.”

She frowns, and her eyes crinkle as she concentrates. “You’re the first person like me I’ve ever met. Do you know anyone else?”

“A few. My uncle, and my mother. Some of my uncle’s students.”

“It runs in your family?”

“Yes.”

He feels a poking sensation in his head. “Hey, stop that. Do you see me trying to rifle around in your mind?”

“It’s so much faster than asking a bunch of questions, though.”

“I know, but it’s not nice, so you shouldn’t do it unless someone’s in danger.”

She looks at him while she opens the can of water and takes a tiny sip. “Okay, I won’t do it again. To you.” 

“Thank you. Now, you said Plutt keeps all the money from your shows?”

“Yes. He swears he’s set some aside for me, but I can’t know for sure because I can’t read his mind.”

“Blobfish are tough like that.”

“He claims that the rest goes to paying the staff and my bodyguards and feeding and clothing me.”

“Other than your stage costume, he doesn’t seem to be doing a great job at that.”

She blushes and tugs her cloak tighter around her. “I wouldn’t want to walk around here wearing nice clothes. That’s how you get mugged. Like how that one man, with the dead mother, was going to rob you after the show.”

So that’s why the man had been talking to him, why he’d felt that flash of greed. He’d been so confident he’d figured out the big con that he’d almost let himself be a completely different kind of mark. 

“I don’t think he’d have succeeded, do you?”

She regards him closely. “I think he’d be dead now, if he’d gotten the chance to try it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You were thinking very loudly when the guards took you out.”

“What do you want, Reyna?” he asks. 

“It’s just Rey,” she says. “Plutt thought Reyna sounded more mysterious and regal.”

“Alright, Rey. What do you want?”

“I just wanted to know if you know more about...this,” she says, waving her hand vaguely around her head. 

“I know a lot about it. Maybe more than I want to.”

She purses her lips and looks down, then back up at him, helplessly. 

“There’s a lot, Rey, and I can’t even skim the surface before morning.”

“How long will you be here?”

“I only came to find out if you were a fraud. That’s my job. Well, part of it.I investigate strange phenomena to determine if they’re Force related or fraud or something else. It’s usually one of the first two.”

“Oh. Well, I’m not a fraud, so…”

“Well, technically you are a little. Assuming you can’t actually speak to the dead.”

She smiles, proudly. “That’s just the mind reading. I wish you’d seen the rest of the show. I’m pretty convincing.”

“I don’t doubt it.” 

“Why do you do the job you do? Do you get paid for it?”

“Sometimes. Mostly I didn’t want to be a Jedi. Or a smuggler. Or a politician.”

“Oh.” She absorbs this silently as she eats the crisps, much more slowly than she clearly wants to. She accepts another packet of crisps with a smile. 

“You could leave with me,” he says, impulsively. It may be a terrible idea, but it feels like something his mother would do, meaning it probably is a bad idea but one that will work out in the end. 

Rey’s smile drops and she stands, lip trembling. “I can’t leave here. I won’t, not until they come back, and I don’t want to go with some strange old man.”

Ben looks around exaggeratedly. “I don’t see any old men.” 

He fails to make her laugh, and she backs toward the door, still clutching the can of water. She summons the bag of crisps to her and slaps her palm against the door panel without turning around. 

“I’m not going to be sold off planet.”

“Who said anything about buying you?”

“Plutt would never let me leave without getting paid.”

“We could leave right now, you don’t even have to go back there. And you wouldn’t have to work every night like this. You’d get to be a kid, and a student. I could show you the ways of the Force.”

“The Force?” she says. “Like in the fairy tales?”

“That’s what this is, it’s what you can do.”

She stills, eyes darting around as she thinks, then takes a step toward him. “You’d teach me?”

“Yes.”

She smiles, briefly, but then it fades along with the light in her eyes. “I can’t leave. They wouldn’t be able to find me.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“My family. I’m sorry,” she says, and darts out the door. 

Ben follows, but she’s disappeared into the night, so fast he doesn’t even know what direction she ran in. She’s already figured out how to hide herself from him. 

He waits up through the night, but she doesn’t come back, and the next morning, Plutt’s men make it clear that he needs to clear out. However, he convinces one, with a few credits and an extra push courtesy of the Force, to give Rey a holodisk with his information. 

As he leaves atmo, he can’t help thinking he backed down too quickly. He probably could have paid off Plutt to take the girl with him, but he thinks back to how distressed the prospect made her, how adamantly she insisted her family would come back for her, and knows she would never forgive him if he did that. 

Now, he can only hope that he’ll be able to forgive himself for leaving her behind. 

He thinks about her often over the next few years, always planning to go back and check on her, and always something holding him back, or diverting his plans. More than once, he thinks he sees her in a vision, but he doesn’t know if it’s real or wishful thinking. 

Seven years after meeting her, he’s in the hangar working on his ship when her presence comes screeching into the Force with all the vibrancy of that first day, then he hears the familiar sound of the Millennium Falcon approaching. His father lost that ship in a bet--though he tells everyone it was stolen--several years before, but soon enough, it touches down outside. Ben goes out to greet it, but inexplicably, instead of Lando or his father walking down the ramp, a tall, slender girl with long dark hair emerges. 

“Hello,” she says. “Remember me?”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

Chandrila, 36 ABY

Rey is having one of her nightmares. They don’t come frequently now, but when they do come, her fear can be powerful enough to send things flying through the air, or short out the power in buildings. Once, she took out their entire block. She’s never told him what they’re about. She’s as tight lipped about the content of her dreams as she is about the events that likely caused them. The only thing she said when she showed up with the Falcon was that she and Plutt had ended their arrangement, less than amicably, and she took the ship because it was the one she was able to repair.

She keeps her mind guarded closely. Even though he would never purposefully pry, she manages such control that the only things she’s ever accidentally projected at him were vague emotions, never the full thoughts and memories other people inadvertently throw his way. She’s less guarded in her sleep, but he would never cross that line with her.

As demonstrated in their first meeting, she’s as skilled a mind reader as he is. He allowed her full access to his mind when he was evaluating her powers, and her ability to hone in on the information she wanted was astounding. He has a tendency to get distracted, to meander down intriguing paths in people’s memories. He’s never met anyone as singularly focused as Rey. 

“No!” she moans, from the other room, as the objects on Ben’s desk begin to shake. 

He hesitates. Waking her can be as dangerous as letting her sleep. He’s been thrown across the room more than once, and suffered a few black eyes. She always heals him, but it’s an unpleasant experience for both of them. Her guilt often hurts more than the physical injuries. 

“No!” 

This is closer to a scream, so he goes to the door adjoining their rooms and knocks. This sometimes works to rouse her, but the fear and anger rolling off of her is a red and black miasma. She’s deeply asleep, and terrified.

He eases the door open. “Rey?” 

She moans again, and he enters the room. She’s curled into a ball at the head of the bed, clutching the blanket against her chest. She’s drenched in sweat and her hair has come out of the braids she wears to bed. 

He says her name again as he approaches, but it has no affect. He kneels next to the bed, takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. First, he needs to center himself, get rid of the fear that she’ll lash out, get rid of the empathy that will cloud his judgment, get rid of the anger at whoever hurt her so badly that nightmares are her only outlet. He thinks about the sky on Naboo in the spring, of apple blossoms floating down to blanket the rich green grass, of bird song and rushing streams. 

As he floats in this memory, the waves of Rey’s emotions slow and cool down, before forming a mist as impenetrable as a fortress wall. He opens his eyes to find her sitting up, her nightlight on, staring at him. 

“Hello,” he says. ”Do you need anything?” 

She shakes her head. “I’m fine. You can go back to your work.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she says, firmly. 

He nods and gets up to go. 

“Hey.”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

He nods and goes back to his desk. The walls are thin, so he can hear her humming as she changes her sheets, and her soft footsteps in the hallway as she heads to the ‘fresher. 

He tries to read, but gives up after reading the same sentence several times without absorbing it. 

If only she would open up to him it would help; to have someone else know what happened, someone who could understand at least part of it. She holds onto her secrets so tightly, always hovering close to the edge of tumbling into darkness. 

It’s an edge he’s been to, more than once, and he knows how oddly comforting that can become, and how hard it can be to pull back, because emptiness is better than pain. 

Then there was the other thing, something he hadn’t anticipated but should have seen coming a mile off. Last week she had a particularly bad nightmare. Unable to calm her down, he had to physically shake her. There was no violence when she awoke, only tears, and instead of distancing herself from him as usual, she clung to him, throwing her arms around him, her hands digging into his back as though she were afraid she would be dragged away. He sat with her for several minutes, telling her it was okay and stroking her hair, just as his mother had done when he had nightmares. At some point, something in the air changed, and she pulled away to look at him in wonder before pressing her mouth to his. 

He didn’t allow it, had pulled himself away as soon as what she was doing registered, but in that one moment it felt like something in him had been quenched while something else had awakened.

“Rey,” he started.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I’m not really myself right now. I don’t...I don’t know why I did that. I won’t do it again.”

Her stoic mask in place, she turned away and he left the room, his hands shaking, repressing the odd jolt of disappointment at her words. 

They haven’t talked about it, but things have been strained between them, more so than their usual butting of heads over cases, training and lore. Part of it is boredom, because they haven’t taken a job in weeks. There’s only so much training and studying they can do, and Rey is always at her best out in the field. 

He scrolls through his datapad, flipping through some of the potential cases they’ve rejected in the past six months. They all look just as mundane as they had the first time he looked at them. 

Most are potential hauntings. They solved more than half of them by advising people to install toxin detectors in their homes, to eliminate the possibility of hallucinations. Another had obviously been the teenage son fooling around with holoprojectors. 

One does catch his eye, not due to the complexity of the case, but the location. It’s a planet he’s never visited, which is thought to have several strong Force loci. He reads through the details again. Yes. This could definitely work. 

“Hey, Rey?” he calls out when he hears she’s back in her room. 

She comes in, hair wet and slicked back, wearing one of his discarded tunics over her leggings. He’d tossed it the other day after spilling ink on it. He doesn’t ask if she took it out of the bin. Those kinds of questions embarrass her, and he knows the answer. It’s still hard for her to throw anything away, after years of having so few possessions of her own. 

“Yeah?”

“Do you want to go to Arden Minor?”

* * *

It’s a fairly long sublight trip, as the most direct hyperspace lanes between Chandrilla and Arden Minor are ill maintained, and a more roundabout route would take almost as long, while being harder on the ship. Rey spends much of the first two days in her bunk with the curtain drawn, studying the planet’s history and topography. Ben never knew you could miss someone even when they’re less than twenty feet away. 

On the third day, he’s sitting in the cockpit staring out into the void and drinking caf when Rey joins him for the first time since they took off. 

“I think I should move out when we get back,” she says. 

He’s not sure how to proceed. He should encourage her, but also avoid sounding like he’s eager for her to leave, but he can’t sound like he’s pressuring her to stay. Despite the tension of the last week, he likes their arrangement. Her room is self contained, with its own entrance, ‘fresher, and kitchenette--even a little walled garden of her own--but they’re in close enough proximity that they can bounce ideas off of each other when needed without always being underfoot. 

He does admit it’s an odd arrangement for business partners, however, and it was supposed to be temporary. 

“Are you sure?” he asks. It seems like the safest path. 

“Yes,” she says. “I’ve never been on my own. Not really.”

“Okay,” he says, after some thought. “Do you need help finding something?”

She shakes her head. “I want to do it all by myself.”

He nods and sips his caf. She’s made her mind up, so there’s not much to say. He’s surprised, though, at how much it hurts. He can’t let her see or feel it, though. The last thing he wants is for her to feel obligated to him. 

“We can convert my room into an office,” she offers. 

“Good idea.”

She looks at him, something hovering behind her eyes that he can’t quite place, which she shuts down before he can get a handle on it. 

“Don’t worry about the nightmares,” she says.

“I’ll try.” He goes to the galley for more caf, so she won’t see his face. It’s clear. Her need to be away from him is greater than her fear of being alone, even in her most desolate moments. He should have expected this, even before the kiss. She wasn’t going to keep living in a glorified guest room for the rest of her life.

This is good. They can set clear boundaries. A space for them to be friends and a space to be colleagues. 

“Ben?”

He snaps out of his thoughts, realizes he’s been staring at the caf machine without pouring a new cup. Rey is standing in the doorway, holding her cup. 

“Yeah, sorry. I’m just tired.”

He refills his cup, takes hers and refills it. 

“You know, it might be a good idea for you to go with me, to look at places. So I don’t get swindled.”

“I don’t think there’s any way to swindle you.”

“You’re right. But would you come?”

“Of course.”

She gives him a peck on the cheek, quick, her lips dry on his skin, and goes to her bunk. The soft sliding of the curtain rings resonates in his chest like the slamming of a door. 

It’s raining so hard when they arrive on Arden Minor that they’re forced to make their landing blind, even though it’s only mid morning. They have an advantage, in that they can feel it out without their eyes, but it takes a heavy amount of concentration. As difficult and stressful as it is, Ben loves when he can work with Rey like this. Much like the few times they’ve had to fight their way out of tricky situations, they seem to become one unit, a calm center of the storm around them, anticipating each other’s moves. 

Unfortunately, connecting in that way always leaves them exhausted, so when they arrive at their hotel and are told that it was overbooked and their reservation lost, it takes everything he has not to mind trick the clerk into giving them someone else’s room. He’s not particularly great at influencing people like that, anyway, and there’s no way Rey would agree to do it, so he plasters a smile on his face and asks if there’s anywhere else they could try. 

“There’s been some flooding, so a lot of people had to leave their homes, which means everything is going to be full. Let me see, though. I do have one left. The shower doesn’t work, so I’m not technically supposed to rent it out, but if you don’t care, I’ll give it to you for half price.”

“Fine,” Ben says. They can always shower on the ship if needed.

“Thank you,” Rey says, pointedly. The clerk hands over two key fobs and wishes them luck. 

He hadn’t thought to ask about what type of room they were getting, but he’s somehow not surprised to find that it’s a single room, with a very short bed. 

I didn’t know this was a hotel for Ewoks,” Ben says. 

“I just want a nap. I never sleep well in space.”

“I’m fine on the floor.”

“Are you sure? We can trade off.”

“I guarantee the floor is more comfortable than that bed for me.”

“We could always go back to the ship.”

Ben looks outside, where the rain and wind have kicked up even more. The space port is two miles away and they had a hard enough time finding a transport before the storm strengthened. 

“That’s a no,” he says. 

“Right. So we’ll sleep for a couple of hours, then head out? We should still have plenty of light.”

“You don’t want to be in a haunted abandoned mansion after dark? Why not?”

She holds up a finger “Allegedly haunted. And we don’t know what or who of the natural variety will show up after dark. And like you’ve always said--”

“Houses are just as haunted in daylight as at night.” They laugh and for a bit it’s like old times, the two of them on a case, totally in sync. 

The floor is pretty bad, but he reminds himself he’s slept on worse. At least it’s dry, and clean, and nothing’s crawling around. He can’t shut his mind off, however, no matter how exhausted his body, so he goes over the details of the case. 

He’s on the verge of drifting off when Rey starts to whimper. He doesn’t act immediately, because that’s often as far as it goes. She quiets for several minutes, and he’s drifting again when she starts to cry. 

He sits up. She’s still asleep, tears coursing down her face as she sobs, knees curled into her chest. He closes his eyes and sighs. 

He knows what to do in this situation, but the timing couldn’t be worse. 

He rises and eases into the bed behind her, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her close. 

“Come back,” she sobs. 

He holds her tighter. “Shhh,” he says, into her hair. “You’re safe.”

Eventually, her breathing syncs with his and the sobbing stops. Her body relaxes, but he continues to hold her, though he tells himself he shouldn’t fall asleep like this. 

He tries not to think about her going through this on her own. As he finally drops into sleep, he swears he hears the sound of metal chimes, the smell of hot sand, a brief ache in his bones. 

He wakes up to an aching back and pins and needles in his arm. He opens his eyes to find Rey looking at him. His arm--the one that’s awake--is still around her, but she’s shifted so that she’s facing him. 

“Was it bad?” she whispers. 

“Not that bad.”

Her eyes fill with tears and she curls into him. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know why it’s been happening so often lately.”

“Are you sure you want to start work today? We can get started in the morning.”

“We’re not getting paid for this so I don’t want to waste time. Besides, it’s always better when I’m working.”

They don’t make it out to the site that day, as it’s impossible for them to find a transport willing to take them. He regrets bringing the Falcon rather than a smaller ship, but with a longer journey, he didn’t want them stuck in a small space for days. A lot of good that did. 

The rain lets up long enough for them to dash out to get dinner, and Rey buys a package of sabbac cards at the front desk. She doesn’t ask him to play with her, however, and chooses to play solitaire, taking out the special cards and setting them aside. 

“Sometimes I wonder why Unkar didn’t teach me to play and use me to cheat at sabbac,” she says as she lays out the cards. “He would have made a lot more money, for a lot less effort.”

Ben smiles. “My Uncle Lando taught me when I was five or so. He stopped playing with me pretty quickly, though. He won’t play against my mother, either.”

“I wouldn’t either,” Rey says. 

As is her way, Leia took it in stride when Ben brought Rey home along with the news that the Falcon had returned. Ben had only recently moved back and was still living with his parents while he searched for a place of his own. Leia invited Rey to stay with them and was the first to tend to her during her nightmares. When he found a house, the suite for Rey worried Leia. She told him that Rey could live with Han and her for as long as she needed. He assured her that it would be alright, that it wasn’t like that between them. 

He was wrong, of course, and should have heeded her. He always gets into scrapes when he doesn’t listen to Leia. 

“Damn,” Rey says. She’s already stuck, with more than half the cards left. 

“Do you want to learn how to play?” he asks. The storm is as wild as ever, the wind rattling the window and the rain smacking against it like pebbles. He figures they have plenty of time. 

“Sure.” 

“How much do you already know?”

“The goal is to get to 23 or as close as possible. If you go over you lose.” 

“That’s all?”

She nods. 

“Okay,” he says, shuffling the cards. “I’ll teach it to you straight, then show you some variations. Then we’ll get to the most common cheats. You should rarely even have to use the Force to win.”

As always, Rey is a quick learner, and they’re playing for real by the time the rain lets up, well after sunset. Rey checks the forecast on her datapad. 

“Looks like we’ve got about an eight hour window before the next storm rolls through.”

“How long does night last?”

“6.5 hours.”

“Great. Guess we’re going in the dark.”

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided on Thursdays instead of Saturdays for updates! Thank you so much for all of your comments on the first chapter. I'm trying to get to them all but wanted everyone to know I've read them and appreciate them so much!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are two chapters going up this week, since chapter 4 is short!

Ben doesn’t believe in ghosts, at least not the ones that are bound to one place and haunt people. In all his years of work and study he’s never come across a true spirit that isn’t a dead Force user. Not only have those been extremely rare, but they don’t tend to show up on actual cases. They just pop in on occasion to give unsolicited advice. He hopes that if he becomes one with the Force when he dies he’ll have better things to do than look over a kid’s shoulder while he’s building his lightsaber. 

When supposed hauntings aren’t attributed to gas leaks or bratty teenagers, it’s often only a matter of an individual who is more Force sensitive than average who is not aware of their powers, though not in the same way that Rey and he are. 

More extreme cases usually involve a Force sensitive child just coming into their powers. If it happens during puberty--or if the child is angry, grieving, or traumatized--things can get truly scary. From objects flying around to fire to explosions. Rey said that she first became fully aware when she was concentrating on cleaning grime off a battery cell when it disintegrated to dust in her hands. According to Leia, Ben has been levitating things since before he could sit up, but before he had full control things could get dicey if he were experiencing strong emotions, which happened quite a lot. 

When the cause is a Force sensitive child, the parents are mostly grateful for an explanation, though a few times he’s had to bring a child to his uncle for instruction because the parents are even more terrified once they find out the truth. An evil spirit can be driven out, after all, but when the child’s problem is an intrinsic part of their nature, it’s harder to face. 

Overall, Ben believes that if there really are lost spirits roaming the galaxy, they can’t possibly do more damage than the living beings who populate it. Still, a shiver runs down his spine as they approach their destination. It has little to do with the concentration of dark energy on the site, though there is that, in abundance. The place just looks creepy. 

The mansion was the vacation home of a high ranking Imperial officer, converted into a hospital after the fall of the Empire.The architecture is brutal, a massive block, more fortress than home. Unornamented grey stone walls rise into the sky, unbroken except by tall narrow slots for windows. Most of these have been boarded up. 

Hospital administrators finally gave up on the site fifteen years ago, after a series of unexplained power failures resulted in loss of life and it’s sat empty ever since. According to locals, shadowy figures have been seen passing in front of the unbroken windows, with a mysterious glow lighting them at other times. They swear it’s not the work of vandals or bored kids, and the lack of graffiti or other damage stands as a testament to that. Kids have admitted to breaking in, but none of them stay long. The consensus is that there’s a bad vibe or energy about the place. 

“I haven’t felt a dark locus this powerful since Ach To,” Rey says as they make their way up the long driveway.. 

“It’s a little disappointing, if that’s all this is.”

“All?” Rey says. “You say that like it’s another kid with a projector.”

“I know it’s a big deal, and we should study it, I just hoped it wouldn’t be so obvious.”

“Well, surely there’s something interesting in there, if the locals are actually seeing things and not just feeling it.” She gets out of their rented speeder and heaves her backpack onto her shoulders. “Are you coming?”

The house isn’t locked. There’s no need, as even the bravest people quail in the presence of so much dark energy. It’s almost too much for Ben, and he has to focus, concentrating on Rey’s brightness as she walks beside him. The real trouble with a place this powerful is giving in to it, and that could pose a problem if some unwitting Force sensitive stumbles across it. It poses a bigger problem if a Force sensitive with full knowledge of their powers seeks it out. 

“This doesn’t feel natural,” Rey says as they reach the landing at the top of the front steps. 

“You’re right.” It doesn’t feel like a natural gateway or outlet. It feels forced, as though an object has been placed somewhere inside, to focus the darkness, or perhaps emit it. There’s so much they don’t know about the Force, or how it was used in the centuries before the Old Republic. They could study non stop for the rest of their lives and never uncover all its secrets. 

“You still want to go in?”

“Are you kidding me?” he asks. It's moments like this that he understands his father’s thrill seeking most. What’s the Kessel Run compared to a fountain of pure dark side energy? 

Rey smiles up at him and waves her hand in front of the door, sliding it open. 

Their flashlights illuminate swirls of dust their entrance has kicked up, but there are no signs of squatters, of animal activity, or even of general decay wrought by time, temperature, and water. Other than the thick layer of dust, it looks like it could have been abandoned yesterday, or that someone would be back any moment. There’s even the faintest sting of bacta in the air. 

They walk through the foyer toward a reception desk with a building map above it. Neither of them need it, however. They know where to go, as if following music from another room. 

They move toward the center of the house, where, according to the map, there’s a circular atrium. As they get closer, the air seems thicker, almost sludgy, and it’s harder and harder to feel Rey’s presence, even though she’s walking beside him. It irritates him.

“Why are you blocking me out?” he asks.

“I’m not doing that,” she says.

He laughs derisively. “You block me out every chance you get.”

Rey stops and puts her hand on his arm to stop him. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re just like the rest of them,” he says, shaking free, an anger he hasn’t felt in a decade or more bubbling from where he’s had it tamped down. “You’re just tolerating me, walking on eggshells in case I freak out and make the house explode or something.”

“No, I--”

“Admit it!” he screams at her, and she steps back. “Stop pretending you give a damn about me! None of you do.”

“Ben!” she cries, her voice dim and far away. “Come back, Ben.”

Her voice fades completely and it’s like a hole has opened up in his chest, a great, gaping void where she used to be. Her calming presence, which he’s held in his heart like a jewel since she found him, is replaced by something black and oily. When he was twelve, he was put in a bacta tank after a speeder crash, and his young body burned through the sedative faster than the med droid anticipated. He woke up in a panic, certain he would drown. This is similar, but so much worse. It’s in his mouth, his lungs, his eyes, circulating through his veins. It’s sticky and sickeningly sweet, and seems to be made up of every terrible or embarrassing moment in his life. Every rejection, every failure, concentrated into a viscous, unrelenting sludge of shame. If he could give in and die to escape it, he would. 

“Ben!” her voice breaks through the darkness like a supernova, and like that, he’s back, he can see and feel and hear again. He’s on the floor, shaking and limp, her worried face hovering above him. 

“My, how the tables have turned,” he whispers. 

She laughs through her tears and they fall onto his face. 

“Where did you go? Your eyes...I think we should leave.” 

He sits up, and though the room tilts for a moment, his head starts to clear. “We can do this. I just let my guard down.”

“Ben, you have no idea. You screamed at me, awful things, then you grabbed your head and collapsed. Your eyes were so empty and you kept whimpering. What happened?”

Try as he might, he can’t actually remember what happened, though he knows something did. The terror lingers around him in tendrils but they disappear like smoke before he can get a hold on the cause. She’s here, though, one hand on his face and the other on his arm, anchoring him. 

“I don’t know. Everything was just...gone.” That’s not quite right, but he’s the closest he can get to describing what happened.

“Can you stand?”

“Yes.” 

He struggles to his feet, with her help, and wobbles for a moment before getting his bearings. His stomach is rolling and there’s still a mild pounding behind his right eye. Rey unclips her water canister from her belt and hands it to him. She’d filled it from the tap in their room, and the water here is pure and sweet. It helps clear his head, though he still feels like he woke up from a night of binge drinking and brawling. 

“Seriously, we can come back. You need to recover and we need to think about this some more, do some research. Maybe call in Luke.”

“I’m fine. Really.”

“Whatever,” she says, rolling her eyes. “We always do what you want anyway, even if it might get us killed. It’s not like we’re actual partners or anything.”

“What?”

“You heard me!” She pushes him, and he stumbles into the wall. “You’re always in charge, always treating me like a little kid and I’m not!”

“Rey--”

“Leave me alone! Stop hovering over me like I’m going to fall apart!” she screams and doubles over. She falls to her knees and then to the floor, folded over herself as though preparing for a bomb blast. She rocks back and forth. “No, no, no, no, no!” 

He stoops and puts his arms around her, and she doesn’t push him away, but pain shoots into him in thick spikes. 

“Rey,” he whispers. “It’s okay. I was okay, so you’ll be okay.” 

He tries to center himself, to find the light, in her, in himself, from anything in this damned place. He finds the smallest trace of it and clings to it. Minutes later, or hours later, she quiets and her body goes limp. He sits against the wall, pulling her into his lap. Her breathing is shallow and her pulse is rapid. He wonders if he was as pale as this when he came to. 

Her eyes flutter open and she looks up at him blearily. “Can we leave now?”

“Yes,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

He helps her to her feet and they go back the way they came, leaning on each other. 

“I feel like I’m walking through sand,” she says, after several minutes. She stops when they get to the end of a hallway. “I don’t remember this. Did we come the right way?”

Ben looks behind them. The hall looks like it goes on forever, though he swears they had turned onto it no more than fifty feet back, and their only choice had been a left turn. He tries to orient himself. Whatever is in the atrium is pulling at him, like he’s the needle on a compass, and he can’t get his bearings, even using that as a focal point. 

Rey looks confused as well. She closes her eyes and takes a few deep breaths before shaking her head. “It doesn’t make any sense. I kept track of the turns when we left the foyer. This isn’t right.” 

Ben looks around one more time. “What should we do?”

“Keep trying.”

  
  



	4. Chapter 4

Jakku, 34 ABY

The sand has finally given up the last of the sun’s heat as Rey lifts the tarp covering the old freighter and slips inside. The nights are long this time of year, but she’s got a lot of work to do, and Plutt can’t know she’s here.

There are lots of things Unkar Plutt doesn’t know. 

For instance, all she has to do is think hard enough and she can make herself practically invisible. It allows her far more freedom than Plutt has ever given her. Allows her to do things like sneak into his quarters and listen to him brag to some spacer about how he’s got “his girl” convinced that her parents are coming back to her, that they went off planet to find work and how they’ll be back once they’re financially stable. How they’d actually traded her for a junky old planet hopper and her father had crashed it before leaving atmo, he was so drunk. 

How he’d kept his girl with him for almost fifteen years over that lie. How the money he’s made off of her has gone toward expanding his choke hold not only on Niima Outpost but the other trading posts scattered across Jakku’s blighted surface. How he keeps most of the money in an account off planet. 

It also allowed her to follow him to the place where he keeps a stash of credit chips on hand for emergencies, and to see the booby traps he’s set up. 

Another thing Plutt doesn’t know is that the salvaged flight training simulator he gave her in a rare burst of generosity has been more than adequate in teaching her to fly all sorts of crafts. 

He doesn’t know how thoroughly she’s picked the brains of every scavenger, smuggler and spacer she’s encountered, so that in addition to the knowledge she gained in her six years as a scavenger before becoming The Reyna, she now knows the insides and outsides of those same crafts like the back of her hand, and how to fix them. How to quietly fix a broken down freighter that’s sat abandoned for years. 

When he wakes up in the morning to find her and this freighter gone, he may figure out how much she knows, how much he underestimated her, but she won’t be around to care.

How long will it take to make his way out to a cave in Carbon Ridge and discover that she’s taken back what’s hers?

She does kind of wish she could see his face. She wishes she could bring herself to do more to him, in light of all the realizations and regrets this new knowledge has dredged up, but she can’t. And she won’t think about those things right now.

There’s no telling how loud this rust bucket will be when it fires up, but it may wake him out of the deep sleep she put him in with the draft she slipped into his drink. She’d talked a smuggler out of giving it to her last week, saying she had trouble sleeping, her smile promising things she was never going to give, all the depraved things flashing through his mind as he looked her over. When he tried coming into her quarters that night, he’d been met by her bodyguards and escorted to his ship. 

Rey reaches into her pocket and runs her fingers along the holochip with Ben Solo’s information. She memorized it long ago, but the chip is a reminder that he once existed, that he had also once been hauled away by her bodyguards, but his intentions were good. 

She used to daydream about what her life would have been like if she had gone with him. Ever since finding out she could have gone with him--if Unkar hadn’t lied to her--it became too painful to think about.

What she can think about, however, is a future where he’s there to help her. 

A few times in the last seven years, she’s been certain that she’s seen him in dreams. The real Ben, not an imaginary one. She doesn’t know if the Force actually makes that possible, or if it’s wishful thinking, but it gives her faith that he’s still alive, and that somehow, she’ll find him. 

After several hours of work, she thinks she’s got it. She’s been working on it off and on for six months, and there are a few things that look iffy, but since she took off all of Unkar’s modifications the ship is much happier. She runs a final diagnostic test and decides it’s as good as it’s going to get. 

Rey doesn’t know if the Force is something you pray to, but she does it anyway before beginning the startup sequence. The ship fires up, and it’s loud, but it only groans a little when it lifts into the air, shedding the tarp as it goes. 

It’s impossible to see if anyone rouses at the outpost, but no one follows as she leaves atmo. 

Once she’s away from the planet’s pull she punches in the coordinates. Pushes the lever. The stars lengthen into blue streaks, and she’s gone. 


	5. Chapter 5

Arden Minor, 36 ABY

Rey has been afraid before, many, many times. Jakku was a harsh place, before and after she was abandoned, and her dreams alone would terrorize the most stoic warrior. Even so, she has never felt cold, empty terror like what descended on her as she blacked out. She doesn’t remember anything after yelling at Ben, other than that emptiness. Then she woke up in his arms and for a moment she had felt safe again. 

What she feels now, as they take turn after turn, always ending up in the same place, isn’t stark terror but a creeping dread, the kind that gets its tendrils in you like a poisonous vine and before you’re aware, you’re half eaten alive. 

“Ben, stop,” she says, finally, when they come to the same dead end, or what might be a completely different dead end that only looks like the last. “Let’s see if we can get to the atrium, then we can orient ourselves and find a way out.”

Irritation flashes across his face and she fears another outburst that will lead to another episode of whatever it was that afflicted them, but he fights it. They’re concentrating so hard on not letting the energy of this place affect them, but it’s draining, and the onslaught is relentless, especially added to the frustration of wandering in circles. 

As soon as they make the decision to go toward the center of the building instead of away, the pressure decreases and they make progress. In fact, it feels as though whatever they’re heading toward is wonderful, soft and welcoming. 

After only a few minutes, they open a set of double doors that lead into a wide, wild space, with moonlight pouring in through the glass dome ceiling onto a fountain, which is inexplicably running. Vines and flowers have burst from their cultivated boxes and beds, spilling across the pathways and onto benches and ornamental statues. Many of them are bioluminescent, pulsing slowly in an array of colors, in time with tiny glowing insects. The air is heavily perfumed but she’s unable to place it, though she’s become obsessed with flowers since leaving Jakku. She casts out with her mind and finds no other sentient beings in the space, though the space around the fountain positively undulates with the Force. 

“Do you feel that?” Ben says. 

“Big time.”

They make their way to the fountain, having forgotten that their plan was to find a way out. The closer they get, the more it sounds like someone, or perhaps many someones, are whispering, barely audible over the sound of the running water. The pool itself is a dusty rose color, and the plume of water at the center, which shoots two meters up before raining down in graceful arcs, is also glowing softly with alternating shades of blue and green, though there don’t appear to be any lights in the fountain. The voices seem to come from the water, filtering out from the spaces between the drops hitting the surface.

She creeps closer, certain she can make out what the voices are saying if she can only get close enough. Kneeling on the lip of the fountain, she leans over. Almost...almost…

With a gut wrenching pull, she falls into the fountain, but instead of landing in ten inches of water she keeps falling, faster than should be possible in water, until she’s unceremoniously dumped out into a freefall. She stops herself before she crashes into the earth, then rolls over, looking up at a circle of water churning at the top of a cavern, which is inexplicably dry. 

“What the hell?” she says. She sinks the rest of the way to the ground and struggles to her feet. 

Her clothes are wet and it’s achingly cold. Her flashlight is lost so she ignites her lightsaber--a gift from Ben that used to belong to his grandfather--and circles the chamber, looking for doors, cracks or any indication that there’s a way out. She completes a circuit of the room and finds nothing, so she attempts to levitate to the top. The earlier attack and the onslaught of darkness have depleted her energy considerably, however, and she only manages to get a foot or so off the ground before crashing down again. It’s frustrating, but honestly she doesn’t think she’d be able to struggle through who knows how much water to reach the surface. 

She reaches out for Ben. She thought she heard him call her name as she was falling, but the memory of those few seconds is already hazy. She can sense him, but the signal is weak, as though they’re lightyears apart rather than a few hundred meters. This place is weird enough that she wouldn’t be surprised if they did suddenly have the entire galaxy between them. 

Sometimes their connection is more of a curse than a blessing, because it feels like she’s never truly alone in her head, and it drives her insane when he chooses to communicate that way rather than get up and come into the next room. 

Right now she would give anything for him to speak to her through their connection.

She’s about to see if she can climb to the top of the cavern when Ben splashes through the circle of water. He manages to slow his fall and sink to the ground rather than jerk to a stop centimeters above it as she had. 

When he’s back on his feet, she launches herself at him, wrapping her arms around his waist. “You idiot,” she says into his chest. “Why did you follow me?”

“What was I supposed to do? You couldn’t hear me and I could barely feel you.”

“There’s no way out of here until we rest.”

“Dammit. It was so much nicer up there with the flowers. Is your gear alright?”

In addition to their recording equipment, they never go out into the field without basic survival supplies, even in urban areas. 

“Should be since I didn’t hit the ground, as long as the waterproofing worked.”

Ben’s teeth are chattering and his lips look blue; she’s sure she doesn’t look much better. Building a fire would be ideal but there’s no firewood here, nor is there anywhere for smoke to vent. They do have thermal blankets and a small heater, however. They go through their packs and find that everything has survived the passage through the water. Ben takes the heater out and presses a button. The top pops open as a metal umbrella rises and opens up. The unit serves as a lantern as well, the plasma emitting a soft glow from the top. 

“We need to get out of our clothes,” he says. “The ambient temperature is 58 degrees but we could still suffer from exposure if we stay in them.” He spreads one of the blankets on the ground with the other on top and turns his back to her. She does the same and begins peeling off her clothes. Her pants are practically adhered to her legs and she nearly tumbles while taking them off. She takes her hair down so it will dry quicker. 

“Underwear, too?” she asks as she spreads her other clothes out on the ground and sets her boots near the heater. 

“I wouldn’t recommend keeping them on.”

“Why?”

“They won’t dry as much as everything else and that won’t be pleasant when you put your clothes back on.”

They finish undressing and dive under the top blanket before shimmying out of their underthings. They lie on their backs, staring at the portal above.She tentatively presses herself against his side, wondering if her skin feels as cold and clammy as his. 

“What are we going to do?” she asks, once they’ve both stopped shaking. 

‘Get dry, rest, then try to swim or climb our way back out.”

“What if we can’t get out?”

“Something tells me that whatever is here doesn’t want us to die here, it just wants to keep us for awhile.”

“Well, that’s comforting.”

She moves closer to him, for safety as much as warmth, ignoring the heat gathering between her legs. They can’t have a repeat of last week, and it’s mortifying to have her body respond like this, in this situation. Lately, on the nights when she’s not afflicted by nightmares, she dreams about Ben, his hands and his mouth all over her, his cock inside her. It’s real enough in her dreams to make her come, harder than she does when she fumbles around by herself. She doesn’t know if she makes any sound during these dreams, but lives in fear that he’ll think she’s having a nightmare some night and come in while it’s happening. 

She rolls over on her side and he curls around her. It doesn’t take long for him to fall asleep. Rey focuses on the sounds still coming from the water above, so she won’t focus on the sensation of his wide chest against her back. So she’ll resist the temptation to wiggle her ass just so in order to rouse him. 

There it is, again, a sound like whispers, and as she falls asleep, the whispering grows louder. 

* * *

She doesn’t know what wakes her up. A loud sound, perhaps, but it echoes inside her head rather than the stone chamber. When she looks up, the swirling circle of water is churning more slowly. The light filtering through is a dull purple with the occasional bright flash of white. She sits up, flinching a little as she pulls away from Ben. The heater has run out of battery, but there’s a spare in her gear, so she drags her bag toward her and changes it before venturing out from under the blanket to check on her clothes. They’re dry, if a little stiff, but she feels more human once she gets them on. She considers waking Ben up to tell him to get dressed, but she’s distracted by a gust of wind tickling the tendrils of hair hanging down near her right ear. 

She walks in the direction of the moving air, discovering an opening in the wall about two feet wide. How in the world had they missed this before? 

She turns around to look back at Ben, who’s rolled over on his side, his hand reaching into the empty space she’d left before he settles down again. Something tells her that the tunnel won’t stay open long enough for him to wake and get dressed, so she decides to go alone. 

As she enters the tunnel she searches for any dangerous energy or presence. There’s nothing, the only life a faint bioluminescent moss on the walls giving just enough light for her to see without a flashlight. When she gets around the first turn, she’s surprised to see dim, greenish daylight. The tunnel isn’t long at all, especially compared to all the twists and turns they took earlier above ground. She walks toward the light. 

The tunnel opens up into a forest, and the bright light filtered through green leaves is nearly blinding after the darkness of the cave. It’s quiet, though far off she can hear what sounds like a battle, with the boom of explosions and the shriek of starfighters. She revolves slowly, taking in her surroundings. She left her lightsaber inside, but the blaster that Ben’s dad gave her is strapped to her hip. She removes it from the holster and flicks the safety off. Something’s out there. At first it feels like Ben, so she turns around, expecting him to step out of the cave. Not only is Ben not there, but the cave entrance has disappeared as well. 

She feels the presence again. It’s not Ben, though it has his essence. It’s darker, heavier, and much, much angrier. 

She turns suddenly at the buzzing sound of a distant lightsaber, in time to see a huge, masked, black-clad figure step out from a cropping of boulders and into the clearing. This is the stuff of one of her nightmares, but it never feels this real, the smell of damp earth and greenery mixed with the smoke and ozone of battle. The sweat trickling down her temples and her spine. The sharp tingling all over her body.

She doesn’t think, just begins shooting at it, afraid to turn her back on it as she retreats. It deflects the bolts easily, almost casually, never stopping its pursuit of her. 

Finally, it seems to tire of the game and reaches its hand out. Instantly she’s caught by unseen bonds, frozen in place, the blaster held stiffly at her side. The creature approaches her, malevolence rolling off of it.

Its mask distorts its voice into a mechanical growl. “The girl I’ve heard so much about.”

Was it from Jakku? Was it sent by Plutt, after all this time?

Rey can’t turn to look when she feels the crackle and heat of a lightsaber next to her face. 

“The droid,” it asks. “Where is it?” 

What droid? She knows plenty of droids, but she can’t speak to ask what it’s talking about. 

It steps around to face her again and reaches toward her face, its gloved hand nearly touching her. She’s pretty sure it’s human, now, or at least humanoid. A spike of pain drives into her forehead. 

It tilts his head and says, “The map. You’ve seen it,” the mechanical voice full of what sounds like wonder. 

The creature turns its head as two stormtroopers approach, but it’s very hard to make out what they’re saying as the buzzing in her head grows louder. Moments later, everything goes black. 

* * *

She wakes to a loud clanking sound, as though a heavy door has been thrown back, letting consciousness stream in like light. She looks around. She’s in a cold, dark room, strapped to some kind of table tilted at an angle. As her eyes adjust, she sees the creature or man or whatever it is crouched in front of her, watching. 

How long had she been out and how long had he been sitting there? 

“Where am I?” she asks.

“You’re my guest.”

“Where are the others?”

Why had she said that? What others? Ben is only one person. Her mind is still fuzzy and it feels like she’s clawing her way through cotton.

“Do you mean the murderers, traitors, and thieves you call friends? You’ll be relieved to hear I have no idea.”

Whatever this beast is, she wishes she still had her blaster so she could put a bolt through that helmet. How does a mask manage to look smug?

“You still want to kill me,” he says. Again, that sense of wonder. 

“That’s what happens when you’re being hunted by a creature in a mask,” she grits out. 

He lifts his hands to the helmet, pushes a button, and with a hiss, the front of the mask disengages. He stands as he takes the helmet off. 

Two things go through Rey’s mind as the face of Ben Solo is revealed: relief that this is obviously another dream, followed very closely by a nauseating wave of terror at the idea that it might not be. There’s something about his eyes, eyes that are beautiful like Ben’s without a trace of kindness or love. At his angriest, Ben has never looked at her like this. This anger feels like his anger, however, only amplified, jacked up to levels his body has trouble containing, no matter how tightly he’s wrapped in those black clothes. 

Whether it’s a vision, or a dream, or a hallucination, she doesn’t know, but as he takes a step closer to her, those terrible eyes trained on her, she welcomes the blackness again. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	6. Chapter 6

Ben wakes slowly, becoming aware of each of his senses individually. The sound of churning water, the smell of damp stone, the taste of sleep in his mouth, and the chill in the air. He opens his eyes and it takes a moment to comprehend what’s going on above him. 

Right. The fountain that’s a portal. A strange cave with no exit. Rey and he are trapped. 

“Rey?” he says, his other sense roaring back to life as he detects her absence. He sits up, aching and stiff. Her side of the blanket is empty, the heater gone cold, the other spent battery on the ground next to it. If she woke up and changed the battery before she left, she’s been gone for hours. 

But where has she gone? He can’t sense her at all though he knows she’s still alive. Luke told him what would happen if one of them died, how the other would feel like they were dying. He’s terrified, but that place in his heart where she lives is full and alive. 

He dresses quickly and tests his flashlight. It’s dry but the batteries did not survive being submerged. His lightsaber does work, as does Rey’s, which she has worryingly left behind. He takes them both and takes a circuit around the room, looking for an opening they obviously missed before, though surely Rey would have told him if she found a way out? 

Considering what happened to them earlier, whatever influenced them could easily have lured her away.

An icy gust of wind buffets him from the far side of the room and he runs over. The wind coming through carries the bite of snow and ice--a far cry from the tropical climate they came from. He clips Rey’s saber to his belt as he creeps into a stone corridor. As he goes, the stone blocks give way to raw stone, though he’s not sure when or how it occurs. The wind carries not only the smell of snow, but of blood and sweat and the hum and crash of a lightsaber battle. 

He puts his saber out, wary of being seen as he steps out of the tunnel into a dark, snowy forest. He turns around and there is only more forest behind. The dueling sounds have stopped, leaving behind a rumbling and shaking of the earth beneath his feet. This planet is in great distress, about to tear itself apart. 

He flicks the button on his saber as the sky grows darker and nearly drops it when the blade comes out an angry, spitting orange-red. The design has changed, too. He can see the remnants of his beautiful hilt, but this weapon is frightening in its haphazard appearance, and he can sense the pain of the crystal in its core, its energy venting from the crossguard. There’s a dull, wet aching in his side and the sharp fire of a lightsaber wound on his shoulder and leg. Rey’s saber has disappeared from his belt. 

Before he can fully react, a feral cry rings out and Rey is running toward him, saber raised high. He barely has time to parry the blow she tries to land straight down on his head, and before he can speak she kicks him in the center of his chest, sending him to the ground, flat on his back. A cheap move, but one he taught her. He looks up at her as she stalks around him in a half circle. This is Rey but not  _ Rey _ . She is half starved, angry, and terrified. Most of that anger seems to be aimed at him. 

“Rey,” he says, as he stumbles to his feet, but she lashes out again. This time he catches her by the wrists. They struggle like this, his strength fading from the wounds he somehow sustained before he dropped into this moment, and Rey’s strength augmented by her fury, until she wrests herself away, slashes his saber from his hand and takes an upward swipe at him with her own. 

He’s not aware of the pain, just the rending of his clothing and the skin on his face, the terrifying flash as the saber barely misses his eye. He collapses on the ground and looks up at this horrifying creature circling him, teeth bared, eyes blazing. Thick darkness surrounds her, as though it has hands that will hook into her and drag her down into the crumbling earth. 

“Rey,” he says again, desperate to get through to her. She raises her sword and he cries her name again. 

This time, he gets through. She stops and stares at him, dropping the saber and going to her knees. She is his Rey again, eyes full of love and guilt and horror at her actions. 

He smiles weakly as a sweet darkness closes in on him. The last thing he hears is a choking sob. 

“What have I done?”

* * *

When he wakes again, he is back in the cavern, and the first thing he is aware of is Rey. He is covered with both blankets and her body is curled around him, her arm tight around his waist as she sobs quietly against his neck. 

He puts his hand on her head and strokes her hair. “No need for that. It’s just a scratch.” Though, from what he can tell when he scrunches up his face, he isn’t injured at all. 

She looks up, eyes red and full of sorrow. “I’m so sorry, Ben. I don’t know what happened or what came over me.” She tells him about her vision, about being taken by a dark version of Ben.

“When I woke up again, I was in those woods and facing you. But it wasn’t you. You were so angry, and in so much pain and I knew, in your mind I could see it. You had--oh God.”

“I had what?”

She shakes her head. 

“Tell me.”

“You had...killed Han. Right in front of me.”

This knocks the breath out of him as surely as her kicking him in the forest. Han and he have had their differences but he can’t imagine any scenario where he would want to kill his own father, unless he seriously hurt his mother. They don’t see each other nearly enough now, but they’re always happy to see each other. 

“How--”

“I was so angry and I wanted to kill you. I’ve never been more furious in my life.”

“You didn’t kill me, though.”

“Were you there? Do you remember any of it?”

“I was in the woods about fifteen seconds before you came at me.”

Her face crumples and she kisses his jaw, then his cheek, working her way up to a spot just above his left eye, tracing the path of a wound that doesn’t exist, though his skin is seared nonetheless. 

“We have to get out of here,” she says. “I don’t know what’s going on but we have to leave.”

He sits up, but she doesn’t let go of him, her hands still fisted in his shirt, her face still inches from his. He looks into those unfathomably beautiful eyes. 

"Rey,” he whispers, unsure if it’s a warning or an invitation.

She kisses him, full on the mouth, and this time he doesn’t pull away. It’s a worse idea now than it was in the safety of her room but he also doesn’t know if they’re going to make it out alive and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t take this opportunity. 

She’s the only person he’s kissed since he was a teenager, and even back then it didn't really mean anything. They had gone to visit Luke at his school, and one night one of the older students brought out a contraband jug of wine. The night descended into silly party games, including one where they shoved two people in a closet together for seven minutes. He'd been put in three times, the students finding it hilarious to throw the Master's nephew in with whomever. There was a human boy, a zabrak girl, and a gender free Togruta. He left for home the next day with a lekku fixation that stuck with him for years. 

All thoughts of lekku are obliterated when he gets his hands on Rey’s breasts. His hands seem to have moved under her shirt of their own accord, and he only realizes it when she breaks the kiss to gasp at the contact, then presses herself into his hands as she threads her own hands into his hair and continues to kiss him. 

He’s fairly certain she’s never kissed anyone other than him--though they’ve never delved into her history in that regard--but she’s very good at it, and she seems to have a fondness for his bottom lip, considering how often it ends up between her teeth. Between the sensation of her sucking on his lip, and the softness of her breasts contrasting with the tautness of her nipples, there’s a good chance this might be over with before it really gets started. 

He breaks away, though he moves his hands to her back--still under her shirt--so that she won’t think he’s running away this time. 

She looks at him, with so much trust, and so much wanting. Has she wanted this as long as he has? Despite her clear feelings, he feels like a monster. He's supposed to take care of her. 

“You are taking care of me,” she says. “You always have.”

“You don’t have to do this. You don’t owe me anything.”

She frowns, and he perceives a brief flash of hurt, but she shakes her head and smiles. “I want you. For you. Can’t you feel it?”

Once he allows himself to, he does feel it, both her desire and her love. Is this why she had always kept herself closed off from him?

“How long?” he asks. 

She looks down. “I thought about you all the time after we met, but when I got here I was so afraid I’d built you up in my head. But then there was that day when the little boy came to the door because his lothcat kitten was stuck in a tree, and you went out and floated it down.”

Ben remembers this, how he blushed when one of the boy’s siblings told Rey that Ben did this all the time, and that he had found lost pets, too. She looked at him in wonder and he’s been trying ever since to get her to look at him that way again. 

The way she is now. 

“Is that all it took?” he says.

“All I know is that I wanted to be with you forever even if we were never more than friends.”

He’s not sure he’s ever known this kind of unconditional love from anyone. Or at least he’s never let himself accept it. He touches her cheek, then moves his hand around to cradle the back of her neck. Her hair is as soft as a rabbit pelt at her nape. 

“Do you really want to do this, here?” He wishes he could teleport them to his bed, or to an island resort, or the most luxurious hotel suite they can find on Coruscant, or to his family’s lake house on Naboo. Even their hotel room here would be better than this cold, dark cave. 

“I don’t care where we are.”

He smiles and pulls her close, kissing her slowly, only separating to take off their shirts. He knows they should be saving their energy to try to get out of here, but he also knows, somehow, that this place isn’t going to let them go until it’s ready to. So when she lays down, he follows. With hands shaking from the cold and nerves, he undoes the drawstring on her pants and pulls them down. He takes a moment to drink in the sight of her, her hair fanned out on the coarse gray blanket, her breasts moving as she breathes, the map of faint scars on her chest and belly--a whole history of her life that he’s never known--and the soft triangle of hair between her legs. He leans down and kisses her belly, revelling not only in the warmth of her skin under his lips but her hands in his hair and her soft sigh. 

As much as he would like to work his way further down, he really has no clue what he’s doing, so he works his way back up to her mouth. He kisses some of the more serious looking scars, flashes of how she got them coming to him as he does. She was a scavenger for years before Plutt discovered her powers. Some of her accidents were harrowing, and it was probably reflexive use of the Force that saved her. These visions make him sad, but they also draw him closer to her, experiencing things as she did. He leaves one last lingering kiss on her ribs before switching focus to her breasts. 

As he takes her left nipple in his mouth, he reaches down to touch her, sliding his finger between her lips. He’s sure he’s found her clit when she gasps into his mouth and arches her back. He slides a finger inside of her, sighing along with her, because the thought of her, so warm and wet around his dick is almost enough to make him come. He closes his eyes and focuses all his energy on not doing that. The moment passes and he slides another finger into her, watching her face as he moves them in and out. 

She runs her fingers through his hair and reaches down to touch him. The sensation is enough to make his cock twitch, even through his pants and underwear. She strokes him and whispers his name as she starts to fumble with his belt. 

He looks at her. The desire in her eyes fills his heart to the brim. 

“Please,” she whispers. 

He sits back and undoes his pants. Rey sits up and takes his cock out, stroking it while she kisses his neck. Her fingertips running up and down his side and belly nearly make him lose control again. 

“I really don’t know what I’m doing,” he confesses. 

“It’s okay,” she says. “We can learn together.””

He’s vaguely aware of a change in the light from above, and a soft rumbling underscoring the churning of the water, but he pays it no mind. All that matters is her. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 8 is also coming, later today! It's not quite ready but I wanted to go ahead and share this one.

An Uncharted Planet, 15 ABY

He hates it here. He’s tried so hard to like it but he wants to go home. Maybe it would be different if it were just Uncle Luke and him. He likes when they train together, or when he assists Luke with his research. The other students aren’t mean, exactly, but there’s just so much pressure. Not with the training; he takes to everything easy, from fighting and flying to the quiet stuff like meditating. He knows some of the students resent that, but they would resent it more if he didn’t try, because they would think he didn’t earn his place.

And that’s where the pressure comes from. It’s hard enough carrying the name and/or blood of a whole generation of war heroes, but it’s impossible when the ones closest to you are so well liked and you’re a shy, sometimes grumpy kid. 

He types his full name at the bottom of the message to his parents. Ben Chewbacca Organa Solo. He wonders what it’s like to be a normal person with a normal name and normal parents. No special powers, nothing to live up to. If he goes home he can at least pretend for a while.

He looks over at the precious paper and brushes that his father sent him. They were from Naboo, and he only mentioned in passing once that he had seen the set in a shop the last time he visited his great aunts, and his dad had bought them and hidden them in Ben’s luggage as a surprise. He knows that on some planets they still use paper for common things, and that they even send paper messages. He would love to write this message out by hand and send it, to show off how much his writing has improved and to let them know he’s serious about wanting to come home. But it will be a week before the supply ship comes, and no guarantee the captain will be willing to do such an errand. She can be very grumpy herself. 

Ben thinks about only sending the message to his father--he never wanted Ben to come here anyway--but that may backfire. His mother would see right through that ruse. He has to be brave and confront this head on, the same way he does when he has to spar with one of the older students. 

He thinks he’s presented his argument well, including a plan for an alternate focus that would still require him to study the Force, but not have to become a Knight. He will become a scholar, which wouldn’t require him to live at the Temple. He could go back to visit, of course--lightsaber training is fun after all--but he can study lore and history anywhere, even on trips with his dad. 

The study plan is meant to appeal to his mom. The part where he talks about how lonely he is, how much he misses them, and how Han and he could go on adventures is all for his father’s sake.It’s all true, but Ben laid that part on a little thicker. 

He sends the message and goes over to the writing desk, pulling out a fresh sheet of paper. It’s thick and dyed a very pale blue, like a bird’s egg. He chooses a brush and dips it in the ink, preparing to write his name. 

A sound like thunder but louder crashes above his hut and he stands up. His head starts to swim so he sits back down, the queasiness in his stomach cluing him in that this is a vision. He doesn’t have them often but when he does he wants to throw up at the beginning. 

This doesn’t quite feel like a regular vision, however. He doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but he feels something. 

It’s as though his body is suddenly too small to contain him, but it also feels like a relief in a way, like someone has leant down and whispered, “you’re not alone.”

“Somewhere,” he says to himself and it seems to echo around the room. Somewhere. Somewhere. Somewhere? Somewhere what?

“She is here,” the voice seems to say, though he can’t actually hear it. 

“Who?”

“She.” 

He wakes up hours later tucked into his bed, a wet cloth draped across his forehead. The too-full feeling is gone but something remains, slotted into his heart in a place he didn’t even know was empty. 

“What happened?” he asks his Uncle, who is sitting in a chair beside the bed, reading one of the ancient Jedi books. 

“You tell me,” Luke says, eyes twinkling. 

Ben tells him everything, as best he can, but his uncle doesn’t have an answer. He looks thoughtful, and a little troubled. He tells Ben that he’ll look into it but he doesn’t think it’s anything fatal. 

Though he doesn’t get to go home right away, his parents promise to come get him on his birthday and that he can decide after a break if he wants to go back. 

He doesn’t go back, except for visits a couple of times a year. He veers away from the Jedi path and starts out on a new one. 

When Ben introduces Rey to Luke, he looks at her as though he has been waiting for her. Ben has a moment when he’s afraid Rey is Luke’s long lost daughter or something, but Luke reveals what he had begun to suspect all those years ago: that Ben had felt the birth of a connected soul. It all makes sense, especially the strange occurrence when they first met. At the time he had attributed it to there being two incredibly powerful Force users in the same room, not that it was their souls recognizing each other. He wishes--for perhaps the thousandth time since that night--that he had realized what it was then. Even if taking her with him then wasn’t the right choice, he could have talked to his mother and uncle and formed a plan. 

Then Rey turns to him with those eyes and smiles. “You were with me all along.”

  
  
  



	8. Chapter 8

Arden Minor, 36 ABY

There’s a change in the color of the water above them, but Rey barely notices, because Ben Solo is inside her. Well, not all of him, and not all the way, but she’s wanted Ben--loved him--for so long that it’s hard to comprehend that this is really happening, especially with everything else that’s happened tonight. 

After she kissed him last week, she thought there was no way he returned her feelings, and the only thing she could think to do was move out. It wasn’t to punish him; she thought it was the only way for her to move on without getting hurt. She couldn’t bear the idea of watching him fall in love with someone else while she was in the next room. 

Incredible that his hesitation had been a fear of hurting her, a fear that loving her was somehow wrong since he was in so many ways her benefactor. 

Before leaving Jakku, she had never met a man who didn’t want to take advantage of her in some way, and she still runs into them every once in a while now. How could she not love this man, who would rather let her go forever than do that?

His head is down, staring at the place where they’re connected, his hair grazing her chest and his breath quick and shallow in her ear as he pushes into her.

When he looks at her, his beautiful eyes are so full of love and wonder that she’s afraid she’s going to cry, which would probably ruin the mood. Instead, she runs her hand through his hair and caresses his ear.

“Is it okay?” he asks. 

Now, she almost laughs. It’s more than okay; it’s exquisite. She had been afraid for a moment, but it’s perfect, and when he starts to move she can’t help but curse it feels so amazing. They’re both clumsy and awkward as they try to find a rhythm, but that only confirms that it is, in fact, real. 

He shifts forward slightly, pushing deeper inside her, with more friction on her center, and every thought leaves her head other than how good it feels. She closes her eyes and without warning falls into several lifetimes worth of memories. 

They’ve done this before. The face she sees above her or below her or the hand she sees reaching around her body doesn’t always look the same but it’s him. That same presence that’s been with her since she can remember, that she only really recognized when she met him on Jakku. She opens her eyes again, looking at his face. 

His eyes are distant and sad. Is he having second thoughts?

“Hey,” she says, stroking his cheek. He looks at her, then blinks and smiles before kissing her deeply, almost roughly. 

He snakes his arm underneath her waist and lifts her hips as he leans back on his knees, and she wraps her legs around him instinctively to keep from falling, but he’s so strong, with one hand still braced on the ground and the other holding her, with maybe a little help from the Force, that it’s not totally necessary. He thrusts into her and pulls her closer at the same time in quick, jerking motions. His early gentleness is gone, as if a switch has been flipped, but she doesn’t exactly mind, other than giving a brief thought to the burns the blanket might leave on her back and shoulders. She loses herself to the sensations again. 

Their connection seems to stretch so that it wraps around them like a blanket rather than tying them together, and for a moment they’re so close she feels like she’s literally rushing through his veins. It’s almost too much to bear but she does, and then she’s back in her body as an intense pleasure washes over her, and him. He’s breathing hard, making little whining noises as he exhales. He pulls her toward him one more time, hard, and lets out a long moan as he lowers her to the ground. He stretches out, half on top of her, kissing her all over her face and neck, then nuzzling his face in her chest. 

The rest of the world comes back slowly as they lay in silence. The circle of water above is churning wildly, flickering with rainbow colors. 

“Ben, look,” she says. 

He mumbles and shakes his head, clearly on the verge of sleep. 

“I’m serious,” she says, tugging on his ear. 

Ben rolls over and looks up. “Well, that’s different,” he says. 

“We need to get out of here,” she says, sitting up and looking for her clothes. Ben grabs her by the forearm and drags her toward him so that they’re nearly nose to nose, his other hand on the back of her neck. He looks like he wants to say something but all he can do is search her face, as though he’ll find the answer to a question he can’t bring himself to ask. “We’ll talk about it later,” she says. “We need to go.”

He releases her, and she smiles and strokes his cheek before she resumes gathering her clothes. She steals glances at him as he gets dressed. He’s obviously troubled. What’s not written on his face is written on his heart, which is more closed off to her than usual, but she can’t think about that now. 

After they’re dressed, they stand looking up at the water for a long time. 

“Leap or float?” she says. 

“We don’t know how deep it is so we should probably get as much momentum as we can right away, so we don’t have to swim as much.”

“Okay,” Rey says. “Just hold onto me, please.” Her heart is pounding. What if the water goes on forever and they don’t realize until it’s too late to get back? What if they do make it through but find themselves in another weird forest with feral versions of themselves?

“We can’t stay down here forever,” Ben says. He holds out his hand and she takes it. “Don’t let go.” 

They crouch, ready to jump, but there’s a great cracking sound, and the circle of water explodes. 

  
  



	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another two chapter week! The next chapter should be up by the end of Thursday

Jakku, 20 ABY

“She’s got to be worth more than that,” Mama says, glaring at Unkar Plutt. “She’s already good at finding things. It’s like she’s got a sixth sense. Plus, she’s still small enough to crawl into all the nooks and crannies, and she doesn’t eat much at all!.”

“I’ve offered enough credits for you to get off planet and to the Core if you don’t spend it all on knockback nectar.”

“It doesn’t matter; she’s worth more than that.” Mama steps back and crosses her arms, looking away.

Daddy taps Mama on the shoulder and motions for her to step aside with him. Rey tries to follow them but her mother waves her away. Daddy whispers in Mama’s ear and then they talk back and forth for a minute, her mother getting more and more excited, so that her cheeks are as flushed as they are after a long night at the cantina tent as she strides back to Plutt’s booth. 

“1500 credits and she’s yours.” She puts her hand up as Plutt starts to object. “Hear me out. If you keep an eye on her, don’t let her get into any trouble before she’s old enough, you can surely make that back and more, if you know what I mean. She’s going to be a pretty thing.”

Plutt frowns like he does when someone tries to pass off a faulty ship component, then looks over at Rey. She smiles and waves at him like she’s been told to do to keep on his good side. He smiles back, but it’s not the kind of smile that makes Rey feel good. He turns back to Mama.

“The 500 credits I offered stand, but you can have that planet hopper over there. I won it in a card game and I know it runs. It’s fueled up and the former owner won’t come looking for it again. It’s the best of both worlds.”

Mama and Daddy eye him warily and Rey doesn’t blame them. Even though she’s still not sure what’s going on, she does know that even if the ship didn’t run, it’d still be worth more than a thousand credits in parts alone. 

“Fine,” Mama says finally. “500 credits and the ship.” 

They all shake hands and Mama says they just need to pack and they’ll be right back. 

“What’s the hurry?” Plutt says. “Come have a drink or two to celebrate. On me!” 

They head to Plutt’s dwelling, a jumbled mashup of spacecraft and canvas. Rey notices Plutt talking with one of his security officers, who goes in the direction of the ship. He must be getting it ready for them. Rey is excited about leaving because Jakku is so dusty, but she’ll miss some of the people here and the sunrises are always nice. They might not be nice on other planets. 

Plutt, another security guard, and her parents sit around a wooden table under a canopy that stretches the length of Plutt’s ramshackle home. Rey sits next to her mom, and when the brown bottle is passed around, she gives Rey two big gulps of the liquid before pouring her own glass. This isn’t the first time she’s had this medicine, but it still makes her splutter and cough, and the grownups always seem to think it’s really funny. She wipes her mouth and accepts a drink of water, her head already feeling kind of fuzzy. She manages to stay awake for a bit, giggling at everything and nothing. 

As her head slowly drifts to the table, she hears Plutt telling Daddy to have another drink. 

“Don’t mind if I do,” Daddy says, his voice distant. The last thing she hears is the sound of metal cups clinking together. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience! If you missed the notification about chapter 9, make sure to go back!

Arden Minor, 36 ABY

Ben throws his body on top of Rey’s as they drop to the ground. He braces for the impact of who knows how many thousands of gallons of water, but though he clearly hears the water crash to the floor all around them, they’re unharmed. He looks up to see Rey’s left hand lifted in the air, and a dome of water all around them. It ripples and swirls in shades of pink and gold. If he touches it, will his hand come away wet, or will there be some kind of barrier?

“Ben,” Rey says. “Stop gaping and help me.”

“Oh! Right.” He doesn’t do exactly what Rey is doing, because he doesn’t know exactly what she’s doing and he could end up doing more harm than good. He merely opens himself up so that she can draw on his strength if needed. Meanwhile, he casts out with the Force to gauge how much water they’re under. 

“It goes all the way up to the roof,” he says. “We should be able to hold our breath long enough to get to the top.”

“I can make a bubble around us--”

“We need to conserve our energy.” He takes her hand and she jerks it away. 

“I said I will make a bubble around us.” She closes her eyes and more energy moves through him, like something pushing at his back and tugging at his solar plexus. 

“Rey,” Ben says. “Can you swim?”

“Why would I be able to swim?”

“I would have taught you if I’d known. What if you’d needed to on a case?”

“Oh, like right now?” She gestures with her free hand at the water surrounding them. “Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” 

“You studied how to manipulate water but you didn’t think to learn to swim?”

“Ben! We’ll talk about it later!”

“Okay, we’ll talk about that later, too. We’ll talk about everything later.”

“You can swim if you want but I’m making a bubble.”

“I’m not leaving you.” He looks at her, willing her to see that he doesn’t only mean right now. He’s shaken up over what he saw when they were making love, but he can’t let it distract them right now. 

Rey looks at him, at his mouth, raking her gaze up to his eyes. Her eyebrows furrow and she leans in to kiss him. It’s over in an instant and she pulls back.

“I need you to levitate about a foot off the ground,” she instructs. 

He does so, and she begins to create the other half of the sphere, the water tries to rush beneath them but is cut off by the barrier she’s creating. Once it’s sealed completely they begin rising of their own accord, and Rey exhales. 

“That was the hard part,” she says, sitting with her back against the barrier. I mean, it’s still hard but not like that. We can sit back, it’s fine. Just stay open to me.”

He puts his faith in her and settles back against the opposite wall, their legs entangled in a way that’s almost comforting. The wall is strange, not exactly solid, but not wet or cold. Though the water seems infused with light, it’s somehow completely opaque. Rey looks especially beautiful in the rosey glow, her hair in disarray and beads of sweat gathered on her forehead and upper lip. 

He wants to lick the sweat from her lip. 

“Terrible idea,” she says. “You just said we need to save our energy. And you need to focus.”

They don’t talk, but they don’t exactly need to when they’re in tune like this. The water changes colors as they float higher, from pink to purple to blue, but it doesn’t get any clearer. At this point he’s not even sure it is water, or what could be lurking in it, so it’s a good thing Rey’s plan won out. 

“We’re getting close,” she says. “It’s going to get tricky again when we break the surface. You’re right that this might not be water so I don’t want to risk us going in again. I’m going to open the bubble then we’re going to jump. When I say jump.”

They crouch, back to back, after Rey takes the opportunity to kiss him again, on the tip of his nose. 

When they first break the surface, he’s thrown off by how bright everything is, but he barely has time to blink before Rey yells, “Jump!” 

The tension of the barrier dissipates under his feet as he flings himself to the edge of the fountain. There’s a sickening moment when he careens backwards, but a forceful nudge at his back rights him again. He turns around to see Rey on the opposite side of the fountain, hand still reaching out.

“Thank you,” he says.

She joins him on his side of the fountain and they look around. They are indeed back in the atrium but it’s daylight. A bright, sunny, daylight. 

“How many days was it supposed to rain after last night?” he asks. 

“Four.”

“Also, this was definitely a fountain when we went in it, right?” They look out over what is now a pool, the color of midnight, the surface completely even with the stone edge and as smooth and still as glass. 

“Maybe it’s just off now. It was weird that it was on to begin with.” She shudders. “Let’s get out of here.”

The corridor leading from the atrium is bright and silent. Their footsteps echo and he is acutely aware of the sound of their clothes as they walk. When they get to the first intersection, she instinctively takes them left, which leads to a room they hadn’t seen before, a lounge or waiting room. Here, there are dust covers on all the chairs and tables, giving everything a distorted, ghostly look. 

“Dammit,” she says. “I can’t do this again.” She leans into him and he puts his arms around her. Her body is limp and heavy. She must be exhausted. “I wish it would just tell us what it wants.”

“I had another vision, earlier, when we were--”

She looks up at him and grins “I did too! We were--”

“You were fucking someone else.”

Her smile fades and she scowls, but then brightens again. “No! That was all you! It was us, before, in other lifetimes. Didn’t you feel--

"That was me in some spacer's junk heap on Jakku?"

She flinches as though he had struck her and pulls away. “That was--”

“Is he waiting for you on Jakku? Are there others?” 

This time she looks at him like  _ she  _ wants to hit  _ him _ . “What if there were? Did you think I was saving myself for you?”

“You said we’d learn together. You let me think--”

“What was I supposed to say? You’d clearly made some assumptions and I wasn’t going to bruise your ego right before we fucked.”

“That wasn’t fucking.”

She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. He knows he’s being pedantic, and that he’s pushing her to her limit, but he can’t seem to stop himself. He wants her to go there. 

“Why does it even matter when you know how I feel about you?”

He doesn’t know why it matters so much. There’s jealousy, yes, but the assumptions he made were his fault, and probably had more to do with assuaging his guilt for leaving her, imagining she had somehow escaped that hell hole without injury. Then something horrible dawns on him. 

“You--did he make you--I’ll go to Jakku right now and--”

“No, it’s not that. Exactly. I mean, he was definitely planning on it. He got the idea from my parents when they sold me, actually. That he could auction off my virginity.”

“Oh god, Rey.” he steps toward her but she stops him.

“Let me finish.” She takes another deep breath. “I didn’t know about it until I was 16 and I overheard him talking about it. He was originally going to do it when I was fourteen, then someone from Tuanal convinced him that I would lose my powers after. I don’t know where they got that or if they even believed it, but Plutt wasn’t finished making money off of me, so he did come calculations and figured that twenty was the absolute oldest I could be to still get a good price.

“So I got this idea, that I would just lose my virginity to the next good looking spacer who came through. Either I would lose my powers and be free of Plutt, or I would go to the bed of whatever lowlife Plutt sold me to knowing I had swindled both of them.”

“And you didn’t leave because you were still waiting on your parents.” Rey has never told him why she finally decided to leave, but it was obvious she finally realized they were never coming back. 

“I thought about mind tricking whoever the lucky buyer was into thinking he’d had me but I knew Plutt would anticipate that and have someone watch. Or watch himself. So I got drunk one night, snuck out the same way I did when I went to see you, and got it over with.” She looks at him, defiantly. “It wasn’t terrible. He was nice to me in a way no one had been other than you. After that, I was lonely and I figured that if one person would spoil me then it’d be a really big laugh if there were several more.” She shrugs and looks away. "So no, you weren't the first but you were the first person who mattered. I wish you weren't so stuck on the first thing. Though I guess that was a fucked up way to find out."

She resists his touch at first but finally lets him take her in his arms. 

"I'm sorry."

“Once I finally found out everything Plutt had done besides planning to pimp me--tricking me into thinking my parents were alive and stealing my money--I started planning my escape, against this ticking clock. I thought a lot about killing him before I left, but I couldn’t go through with it.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t fight harder to take you with me,” he says. He kisses the top of her head and she squeezes him tighter. 

“I don’t think you and Leia and Luke combined could have gotten me off that planet alive if I didn’t want to go.”

He pulls away and takes her face in his hands, stooping to look her in the eye. “I won’t leave you again, ever.”

Her eyes fill with tears and she attempts a smile. “One of us always leaves first. Every time.”

  
  
  
  
  



	11. Chapter 11

Though Ben had seen her past, in this life, while they were making love, she had seen all of their lives, all at once, in the blink of an eye it seemed. Sometimes they were enemies who never came together. Sometimes they were enemies who come together but fall apart again, through circumstance or death. Sometimes they have a few years of bliss. 

They’ve never had a happy ending. 

She doesn’t understand why the Force would connect them like this, yet never let them be happy forever. 

As she clings to Ben, she takes comfort in how solid and real he is, how strong. She can feel the muscles in his back shift with his breath and just thinking about how his bare arms had felt in her hands makes her want him all over again. Her face is pressed against his chest so she goes on her toes and kisses his neck. He whispers her name. 

“Ben,” she murmurs. “I want you, only you.” She hopes he understands. She would give anything for him to have been the only one. She doesn’t regret what she did; she did the best she could with the knowledge she had. What haunts her is that it didn’t have to be that way. 

He kisses her, deeply, and she melts into him further, her hands roaming his body, sneaking under his shirt to graze his soft skin and the trail of hair that leads from his navel to his cock. She looks at him, his eyes wide with lust and soft with love. She tries to steer him toward one of the sofas but he pushes her toward the wall, backing her against it and pressing against her as he kisses her. When he breaks away, she turns around and he reaches around to undo her pants. She helps him push them down and bends forward slightly, hands flat against the wall. Then he’s inside her again in one stroke, easily because she’s already slick from his seed inside her. She moans with it, lost in the sensation even though it’s insane that they’re doing this, here and now. More insane than doing it in the cave, because there they were trapped, not actively trying to get out. But she’s waited forever for this, from the few times she’d let herself think about it before she left Jakku, to the active fantasies she’s had since finding him. He finds her clit and she moans again at the pressure. 

His movements are hard and fast, so that she has to brace herself hard to keep from bumping too hard into the wall but she doesn’t care. It’s like he’s trying to erase every trace of anyone else having been inside her, and as hard as he’s fucking her, the one hand covering hers is gentle and tender, seeking connection rather than entrapping her, and he’s landing the sweetest kisses on her neck and shoulder. Her hair falls out of the hasty bun she put it in, falling across her eyes, tendrils sticking to her sweaty cheeks and still he fucks her, until the combined pressure on her clit and the sting of his cock inside her coalesce and she’s suspended, like in the moment before sending a ship into a freefall dive, the moment stretched out longer than possible before the tension breaks and she’s plummeting. She reaches one hand back and grabs his hair, needing to further anchor herself to him, to this moment. When she does, his hips stutter briefly but he fucks her even harder until he cries out, his face buried in her neck so that his moans reverberate across her body. 

  
  


She rests her head against the wall, his arm still around her the only thing holding her up. He nuzzles into her hair and says her name, again and again.

"You're mine," he says, his voice strange and edgy. He runs his free hand through her hair, moving it away from her ear, giving him access to nibble at the lobe and whisper in it. "I'll never let you go."

His hand moves to her neck, the fingers gently ghosting across it, and the hair on Rey's arms stands on end. Something has gotten a hold of him again, something dangerous. She gently extricates herself from him so she can pull up her pants. She stays facing the wall, avoiding his gaze so he can't see her fear, and prays he can't feel it. 

"Yes," she says. She reaches for her lightsaber at her side. 

It's not there. 

"Ben?" 

His arm tightens around her. "Looking for something?"

"Just making sure I have everything. Since we need to get out of here."

He murmurs something into her hair and begins kissing the side of her neck again. It’s exquisite, which is distracting her from the danger signals screaming in her head. 

"Why are you afraid of me?" he says. 

"I'm not," she says, though her body is trembling. 

"You are, deep down. Everyone is."

It’s the same insecurity that had slipped out when they first arrived, though this time he appears calm on the surface. Deadly calm. She knows she needs to face him but she's terrified of what she'll see in his eyes. 

"I'm not, I'm just frightened of this place. Don't you want to get back to our hotel? Or the ship? Somewhere with a bed?"

"Don't lie to me," he says. “And don’t try to distract me.” He presses her against the wall momentarily before whipping her around to face him, his hands around her wrists. 

His eyes are as terrible as she imagined, worse than they were in her visions. 

"Yes," she admits. "I'm afraid of you right now but it's because you're not yourself. This place--"

"Don't patronize me!" He tightens his grip and it's like a switch is flipped in her, her fear turning into anger as she twists out of his hold. She summons her saber from where it's fallen to the ground and runs. 

She has a split second lead because he has to redo his trousers, but his stride is longer than hers. She swears she can almost feel his breath on her neck as she takes turn after turn, not knowing where she's heading, but knowing she's no closer to the exit. 

Before she can get her bearings she's crashing through the double doors again, into the atrium. She only has a moment to comprehend a massive, black kyber crystal floating above the surface of the fountain before she hears the whoosh of Ben's saber igniting. She takes a flying leap to create as much distance as possible, turns around and ignites hers. 

She expected his saber to have turned red but it's the same gorgeous, pure blue, which is all the more disturbing when contrasted with his demeanor. 

"I don't want to fight you, Ben. I know this isn't you. You can fight this."

The crystal over the fountain is humming and shimmering, the same whispered voices coming from it that lured her earlier, along with a frequency that penetrates Rey's bones. It feels like a pained wail. 

"I don't want to fight it anymore," he says. His voice is devoid of hope, his eyes dark and blank. "We don't have to keep fighting it. We can stop living in the shadows. We're so powerful together we could rule the galaxy."

"Ben, no," she says.

The kyber crystal vibrates so hard its edges begin to blur, and with a snarl, Ben charges at her. 

They've fought many times, and even though he usually wins, Rey has always suspected that he went easy on her. He's so strong-- physically and in the Force-- and his reach is so long that she's overwhelmed almost immediately, no matter how much strength she calls on to help her parry his blows. And that's all she can hope to do. There's no opportunity for an offensive move at all as he advances on her relentlessly, raining down blow after blow. Finally, when she's afraid her arms will give out completely, he has her on her knees as he lands a blow that sends her saber flying from her hand. She twists and falls onto her stomach trying to reach for it, but he gets to it first, summoning it to his hand easily. She rolls over onto her back just as he crouches above her, legs straddling hers in a gross parody of their earlier lovemaking. 

She looks up at him as he aims his own extinguished hilt at her heart. 

As he looks down at her, there's something of the old Ben there, of the light, the conflict written clearly on his face. It's strangely quiet now, the air still and perfumed, the fireflies floating gently around them. Even the crystal has gone silent, as though it's watching them with bated breath.

Rey latches onto the sliver of hope the dim light in his eyes brings. 

"Ben," she whispers, sending all the love in her heart his way. 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about missing a week! I've been having a lot of difficulty writing lately and have been feeling discouraged, but this one was mostly done and I finally was able to open it and get it edited. I can't promise I'll get back on schedule but thank you for sticking with me!


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